Piping Sung: Women, Canntaireachd and the Role of the Tradition-Bearer1
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PIPING SUNG Piping Sung: Women, Canntaireachd and the Role of the Tradition-Bearer1 JOSHUA DICKSON ABSTRACT. Canntaireachd (pronounced ‘counter-achk’), Gaelic for ‘chanting’, is a complex oral notation used by Scottish pipers for centuries to teach repertoire and performance style in the courtly, ceremonial ceòl mór idiom. Its popular historiography since the 19th century suggests it was fixed and highly formulaic in structure and therefore formal (as befitting its connection to ceòl mór), its use the preserve of the studied elite. However, field recordings of pipers and other tradition-bearers collected and archived since the 1950s in the School of Scottish Studies present a vast trove of evidence suggesting that canntaireachd as a living, vocal medium was (and remains) a dynamic and flexible tool, adapted and refined to personal tastes by each musician; and that it was (is) widely used as well in the transmission of the vernacular ceòl beag idiom - pipe music for dancing and marching. In this paper, I offer some remarks on the nature of canntaireachd, followed by a review of the role of women in the transmission and performance of Highland, and specifically Hebridean, bagpipe music, including the use of canntaireachd as a surrogate performance practice. There follows a case study of Mary Morrison, a woman of twentieth century Barra upbringing, who specialised in performing canntaireachd; concluding with a discussion on what her singing of pipe music has to say about her knowledge of piping and the nature of her role as, arguably, a piping tradition-bearer. In 2006, Professor Hugh Cheape of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig wrote of author William Donaldson’s work, Pipers: a Guide to the Players and Music of the Highland Bagpipe, as effectively defining an ‘ethnomusicology of piping’ (Cheape 2006: 169). Implicit in this remark was a perceived dearth of such defining studies, a recognition that this was a field ripe for development, and an exhortation for further studies to emerge in a similar spirit of participant observation and socio-cultural insight. The reviewer’s comment was prescient in that doctoral theses and published works have since emerged that have significantly contributed to our understanding of Scottish Highland piping in ethnological, sociological, compositional and performative terms from the points of view of scholar-practitioners.2 It bears reminding, however, that his comment was predated by many years by the ground-breaking and arguably ethnomusicological studies of Robin Lorimer in the 1950s and 1960s, Peter Cooke and Christine Chambers in the 1970s, and Allan MacDonald in the 1990s,3 among others. As Scottish bagpipe music constitutes a largely unbroken tradition, and as such is both an emblem of the past and an artefact of the present, it has drawn the attention of western and folk musicologists and cultural historians alike; the common factor between them being an insider’s knowledge of the music and its traditions. In short, we have seen in the past two decades an unprecedented rise in our understanding of the bagpipe as a cultural as well as musical artefact, articulated as never before through, as I once put it elsewhere, ‘the performer’s own grasp of his craft’ (Dickson 2009a: 1). Such gender-specific language now seems ironic, for the present work is an attempt to continue toward the realisation of an ‘ethnomusicology of piping’ by focusing on two intimately related, and equally neglected, subjects: pipers’ traditional syllabic notation, known as canntaireachd, as it pertains to ceòl beag, or the ‘light music’ of the pipes; and the role of women as inheritors and intermediaries of Hebridean piping – that is, as tacitly significant tradition-bearers in historically a man’s arena of expertise. The present study assumes the following research premises: 45 PIPING SUNG 1. women in the Hebrides, or indeed the greater Highlands and Islands, were until relatively recently barred from actively participating in the region’s piping tradition on the basis of a general cultural taboo; 2. women so barred were commonly known to sing pipe tunes in canntaireachd – particularly for dances on occasions when a bagpipe or piper was not to hand; and 3. an analysis of the canntaireachd sung by Hebridean non-piping women within living memory, compared diachronically and phonologically to that of their piping male contemporaries, would afford a greater understanding of the extent to which women in the Hebrides could be considered legitimate inheritors and intermediaries of the region’s historically vibrant piping tradition. With these premises in mind, the study therefore pursues the following aims: to demonstrate that women’s passive participation in an instrumental tradition otherwise denied them can be revealed in large part by their singing of canntaireachd; and to argue that women’s historical exclusion from active participation in piping in traditional Hebridean life prior to modern emancipation, belied a deep understanding of the piping idiom afforded by upbringing, observation, their role as singers and the cultural primacy of the voice in the transmission of knowledge. To begin with, I offer some remarks on the nature of canntaireachd, followed by a review of the role of women in the transmission and performance of Highland, and specifically Hebridean, bagpipe music, including the use of canntaireachd as a surrogate performance practice. There follows a case study of Mary Morrison, a woman of twentieth century Barra upbringing who specialised in performing canntaireachd, concluding with a discussion on what her singing of pipe music has to say about her knowledge of piping and the nature of her role as, arguably, a piping tradition-bearer. Canntaireachd (pronounced ‘counter-achk’), Gaelic for ‘chanting’, is a complex oral notation used by Scottish pipers for centuries to teach repertoire and performance style in the courtly, ceremonial ceòl mór idiom. Its popular historiography since the nineteenth century suggests it was fixed and highly formulaic in structure and therefore formal (as befitting its connection to ceòl mór), its use the preserve of the studied elite.4 However, field recordings of pipers and other tradition-bearers, collected and archived since the 1950s in the School of Scottish Studies, present a vast trove of evidence suggesting that canntaireachd as a living, vocal medium was (and remains) a dynamic and flexible tool, adapted and refined to personal tastes by each musician; and that it was (is) widely used in the transmission of the vernacular ceòl beag idiom – pipe music for dancing and marching – as well. The most significant research to date into canntaireachd as a living, vocal medium was conducted by Chambers (1980), who solicited the opinions of a wide variety of exponents in the late 1970s on the nature of canntaireachd (e.g. what it is, what it is not, and what it is used for). She divided the perceptions as coming from two basic categories of informant: pipers and non-pipers. She further divided the non-pipers into three sub-groups, two of which are relevant to the present study. The first were ‘relatives (particularly female relatives) of pipers themselves … people who have taken an interest in canntaireachd, who understand it and who have absorbed all the related piping lore while growing up in a pipe-oriented family or community’. The second were ‘those who imitate the repertory of sounds used by pipers, 46 PIPING SUNG but arrange them in a euphonic rather than systematically associative fashion’. In other words, ‘canntaireachd’ is what traditionally or formally trained pipers do for the purpose of transmission, teaching and the highlighting of technical detail; non-pipers or informally trained pipers (e.g. travellers), imitating the sounds of pipe music in ignorance of what the sounds actually signify and whose purpose is entertainment, are instead said to be ‘cantering’ (Chambers: 17-35, 319-20). Women and piping in Hebridean tradition: historiography v. reality Today, women and men enjoy essentially equal status in the professional piping world. Women or girls possess equal access to piping tuition in Scottish schools (and of course privately), and access to all competitions, and have begun to achieve the highest awards. This ‘emancipation’ is a relatively recent phenomenon; women were barred, for instance, from competing at the Northern Meeting and Argyllshire Gathering (the Scottish piping world’s two premier annual competitions) until 1977, following the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act in the United Kingdom in 1975. One of the first women officially to compete at the highest level, thanks to the passage of the Act, was Rona Lightfoot née MacDonald (b. 1936), a native of South Uist, who, like contemporaries Seonaid MacAulay née MacIntyre of South Uist’s south end and Catriona Garbutt née Campbell of Benbecula, proved a noteworthy exception to the general cultural taboo against women piping in the Isles. As Lightfoot recently remarked to a journalist, ‘Although girls and women didn’t normally play the pipes I just copied my father and brother and picked up the chanter and learned by ear’ (Muirhead: 10). It has been shown elsewhere that it was not unusual for young girls to learn piping in the mid-twentieth century Hebrides only to be discouraged as young adults; gendered roles in the apprehension of music and song seemed to become entrenched only in adolescence (Dickson 2006: 160). In Lightfoot’s case, she simply carried on playing and was fortunate to have the support of her immediate family in doing so. The status of women in the professional piping world has since risen dramatically, and in 2010, a Gold Medal for ceòl mór was awarded to a woman – Faye Henderson of Kirriemuir – for the first time.5 Conventional wisdom has it, however, that prior to modern times, a cultural taboo saw piping as unwomanly, and first-hand testimony by Hebridean (and other) pipers bears this out.